The SQUEEZE project planned to start early 2023 will discover new ways to maximize the impact of prescription drugs for patients suffering from the chronic autoimmune disease Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA).

Digital healthcare tools and biomarkers play a key role in the project focused on overcoming real-life challenges of drug therapy by addressing behavioral and psychosocial aspects such as non-adherence, psychosocial burdens, perceptions, comorbidities, dosage of medicine etc.

Coordinated by the Medical University of Vienna, a consortium of 13 leading European organizations including university hospitals, research institutions and healthcare companies will conduct the 5-year project co-funded by Horizon Europe.

Affecting >3M patients in the EU and 17.6M worldwide, Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune chronic disease with massive impact on patients’ quality of life with significant socio-economic implications. With the SQUEEZE project new precision medicine tools will emerge:

“The SQUEEZE project is a great privilege to join – I guess it is fair to characterize the consortium as a partnership of the leading and most well-respected European stakeholders within Rheumatoid Arthritis. DAMAN’s role in the SQUEEZE project will focus on development, implementation and pilot testing of digital therapeutics based on our novelty in building next generation healthcare solutions with precision medicine. By the end of the project a digital therapeutic tool utilizing a recommendation engine for patients and healthcare professionals will be implemented,” says Andreas Dam, CEO at DAMAN.

One of the world’s most renowned rheumatology scientists, Professor at the Medical University of Vienna and President of The European League Against Rheumatism (EULAR), Daniel Aletaha:
“Over the past decades promising new treatments for Rheumatoid Arthritis have been introduced. When successful, the SQUEEZE project will enable us to match patient and medical treatment in a significantly more precise manner moving from a trial-and-error treatment regime to a brand-new and patient-focused innovative care model for Rheumatoid Arthritis. The SQUEEZE project has the potential to become a milestone for RA-patients as well as for precision medicine and precision health in general”.

About Daman Digital

Daman, a digital healthcare partner based in Denmark, enables innovative teams develop life-changing solutions for people living with chronic diseases, who deserve to enjoy the highest achievable quality of life. This is made possible by using a co-creation methodology to develop top-grade and patient-centric digital health solutions.

Background

Currently <20% of RA patients achieve remission with first line treatment methotrexate. Less than half of the patients achieve at least low disease activity.

Subsequently, patients not responding to methotrexate are escalated to expensive biologic (bDMARDs) and targeted synthetic DMARDs (tsDMARDs) treatments. Most patients respond to some extent (~60% of patients show at least 20% improvement). However, few patients respond substantially (~20% of patients respond by at least 70%). Furthermore, it is currently not possible to predict which of these DMARDs is the best choice for individual patients. In reality, making RA treatment a real-life clinical trial.

The SQUEEZE Consortium addresses this major unmet need by providing a work program on biomarker use for better selection and optimization of DMARD therapies, considering real-life limitations of drug therapy.

The SQUEEZE project has 9 work sequences including multi-source data infrastructure, applied and experimental precision medicine, drug monitoring and integrated care models. DAMAN will contribute to several work sequences for a total of 54 person-months. The total budget for the 5-year SQUEEZE project is € 12M.

The next couple of months will focus on administrative preparations and final negotiations with the European Commission. The SQUEEZE project is expected to start in early 2023.

The SQUEEZE project Consortium includes university hospitals, research institutions as well as healthcare companies in 10 European countries: